today I'm going to have a closer look at printing photos
I get asked on a daily basis what's the biggest print I can get from my camera
now you'd think that the higher the megapixel count the bigger the image
that you can print from the camera now this is true to a certain extent but
it's not the whole truth if you do a search for this online you'll find that
there are many charts showing you your effective print size for the resolution
of the camera that you have with a bit of research you'll also find out that
there's a recommended dpi and this is dots per inch the dots per inch and
resolution of an image are intrinsically linked but give a drastically different
outcome depending on how they're viewed and what they're viewed on for example a
standard 1920 by 1080 monitor would be fine when you're viewing an image on it
with a dpi of 70 to 80 however when you're printing the recommended dpi is
300 so I'm gonna do a test to see what I can get away with and what looks good I
printed the same image six times at 6 by 4 from a scaled down version of the
edited full-size image you can see it has pushed the DPI up to 1,000 looking
at the final printout it's very crisp and clear
next I dropped the dots per inch down to 300 this is the recommended dpi for
viewing an image at arm's length or less the resolution on this is now 1,800 by
1200 this is also really clear and I can't tell the difference between this
one and the first image I printed for the third image I dropped it down to 200
dots per inch at 6 by 4 inches this gave me a resolution of 1280
again looking at this image it was hard to see much difference up close it
starts to get a little less sharp but at arms-length
it's fine with the 4th image I set it to 150 dots per inch and the resolution was
900 by 600 at this dpi it is starting to get a little less sharp up close but I
think this would be fine in a picture frame on the side or hanging on the wall
as long as you weren't viewing it closer than a meter away at 100 dots per inch
it does start to get a little bit fuzzy and at 50 dots per inch it's unusable
and just looks blurry and pixelated at arm's length so for an a7 3 at 300 dots
per inch technically the biggest you should be
able to print would be 50 by 33 centimeters
however I've already printed a photo at 70 by 50 centimeters and it looks great
I think I could actually push this a lot further as well before seeing any
degradation in the print quality and this comes down to viewing distance
which is a really important factor and it's something you don't actually see
when you're looking at printing guides online now if you followed the rules of
these printing and resolution charts and you wanted to blow an image up to the
size of a billboard at 250 to 300 dpi you'd end up having to take a 15 to 20
gigapixel image which is ridiculous however billboards aren't meant to be
viewed from arm's length away when you stand further back from a billboard
that's when you start seeing the whole picture if you could walk up to a
billboard you'd see that the pixels are actually really big but as you step away
these start to blend together and you just start seeing the whole image so the
further away the person is going to be viewing your image the bigger you can
print it and the lower the DPI that you can get away with if you live in an area
where there's lots of billboards about you may have noticed the ad campaigns by
Apple and probably by a lot of other smart phone companies they take
advantage of this viewing distance and then they'll print an image that has
been taken on one of their phones a lot of people will look at these images and
think well I don't really need a big DSLR or mirrorless camera I can take
really good images with my smart phone and this ad campaign proves it however
this is a little bit misleading as with a billboard
if the viewing distance is 10 meters or more the DPI can be dropped right down
to 15 now the a 73 produces an image of 6,000 by 4,000 pixels now if you're
going to print this onto a billboard and the viewing distance was going to be 10
meters or more you'd be able to blow this image up to around about 10 by 7
meters and that is around about 33 by 22 feet the only way that you're really
going to find out what your camera can produce is to actually start printing
your images and this is the idea behind this video if you're printing an image
that's going into a small picture frame or you
to be viewing it at arm's length or less this should be around about 250 dots per
inch on a wall with a viewing distance of two meters or more you'd be able to
get away with a DPI of 100 to 150 and on a billboard you can drop it down to 15
dots per inch and print an image of 10 meters by 7 meters another thing I've
learned from making this video is the relationship between the dpi and the
resolution for example if an image has a resolution of 3000 by 2,000 pixels and
he set the dpi to 300 its size when printing from Photoshop would be 25 by
17 centimeters but if you set the DPI to 70 it would want to print the image at
108 by 72 centimeters so in setting the DPI
you're basically telling the computer how many pixels you want to fit into an
inch when it prints that image however when viewing on a screen if they're both
3000 by 2000 pixel images that's what they'll look like they'll both look
identical so I've learned that these modern cameras were the high megapixel
counts and decent lenses can produce really big images and if they're being
viewed from quite a distance can produce huge images now there is a lot more to
taking a good picture than dpi is viewing distances and megapixels but if
you take these into consideration when printing your images you'll be able to
produce a much better crisper and cleaner image as always if you like what
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